In the beginning, there was ASCII text format, and everything was compatible with everything else. Text still makes sense for many applications: it’s the format used for everything from email and the web to configuration files and source code. Although many if not most Linux text-based tools are available for other OSes, few OSes are better suited to text manipulation than Linux. Linux doesn’t have a monopoly on the ultimate backward compatibly-formatted, text, but it does make working with text a pleasure.
Text is literally the lingua franca of computing. ASCII uses seven bits to encode 95 printing characters—a through z, A through Z, punctuation and symbols—and 33 non-printing characters—things like backspace and carriage return—that all computers can understand. Although most text editors default to the American English character set, they can also usually be reconfigured to use standard ISO character sets for virtually any language.
Text edtors differ from word processors and desktop publishing programs in that they produce raw text files rather than formatted documents with different fonts, font sizes, graphical elements, or other visual flourishes. But text editors add value in the way they are used: they can format and display text files in useful ways during the editing process, for one thing. Programming editors display source code formatted properly for the programming language being used, and can do things like highlight places where there are missing syntax elements.
Text editors can be handy for writing any kind of document that does not need to be formatted or that uses ASCII-based formatting like HTML tagging; being simple text files, writers and editors can easily compare different versions of the same document, and writers can concentrate on content rather than formatting issues.
Text-only applications abound in computing, and especially so in the open source world where so many tools were first developed when there was no such thing as a GUI. I’ll be posting more over the coming days about text editors, the Big Two text editors, and more about how to use them and what your other open source options can be.